


A Crow Feather Pen

by Eussoros



Category: RWBY
Genre: Body Horror, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mild Gore, werecrows
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:54:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23308687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eussoros/pseuds/Eussoros
Summary: Medieval AU where magic is less kind. James helps Qrow through his molting.
Relationships: Qrow Branwen/James Ironwood
Comments: 9
Kudos: 31





	A Crow Feather Pen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Qrowbars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Qrowbars/gifts).



> This started as Qrowbars and I shooting the shit in a discord chat. Then... it kind of grew.
> 
> I have a part 2 planned for 'eventually.' Maybe tomorrow, maybe next year.

Goose quill pens were the most common among the lettered classes of Remnant. After all, once the down has been taken for stuffing and quilting pillows and linens, the flight feathers of the right wing have been taken for fletching arrows, and the tail feathers have gone to the hatter, it would just be a shame to let the strong quills of the left wing go to waste. With geese being slaughtered for the kitchens every week, their feathers were cheap and plentiful. Like the birds they came from, these pens were serviceable, but not particularly refined or attractive. 

Swan quills were preferred for pens among those with the resources to raise swans or buy their feathers. They were stronger, smoother, and their greater length and diameter meant that they could be trimmed down and reshaped for longer. For those who made their living in writing the records and documents in which a kingdom runs, or for those who could pay for the status symbol of a snowy white pen, swan quills were worth the difficulty of obtaining them. 

However, it was known that the finest pens, for the finest, most delicate and subtle work, came from crows. 

——

They called him Ironwood the Monk, where they thought it wouldn’t get back to him. They tittered and gossiped about the Lord Marshal of the mighty Kingdom of Atlas, wondering at his fondness for the kind of delicate writing instrument usually left to illuminators and fine scribes. In all truth, James didn’t mind much. It was better than when his soldiers wasted their free time speculating on his long bachelorhood - the other reason for the name. 

James sometimes thought that his soldiers had a little too much free time. 

There was a soft sound from behind him. James finished signing the supply order he’d been working on. He cleaned his black quill and set it aside, next to a pot of hot sand in which a half dozen fresh crow feathers were hardening. He stood, pushing back his chair, and turned to his guest.

A crow nestled in a pile of blankets on his bed. His feathers were battered with age and too much nervous preening, and a few were beginning to stick out in odd directions. The bird fussed again, folding and re-folding his wings and getting feather dust all over James’ sheets. 

James smiled. Sitting beside the nest, he offered the bird his left hand. The crow considered it for a moment. He pecked at James’ fingers once, lightly, as if to say  _ don’t think I like you _ . He then shoved his head under James’ hand, and James chuckled and stroked the soft feathers. “I know, dearheart. I know. Molting is the worst. Just think of how handsome and sleek you’ll be, once your new feathers come in.” The bird grumbled and fluffed his feathers, and James ran his fingers carefully through them. A few downy body-feathers came away with his hand. 

He could probably do more for the bird if he preened with his right hand, but he’d said before that the enchanted elf-steel felt weird on his bird-form. So James continued clumsily preening the crow with his flesh-and-blood hand, dislodging such feathers as were ready to come out and getting a few gentle nibbles for his trouble, until the crow grumbled and fluttered his wings again. James tried to soothe him, and the crow pecked at his hand twice - sharply, this time - and jerked his beak at the guttering candle on the desk. 

James blinked, and drew a deep breath. He straightened his back from where he’d slumped, his awareness spreading through his body once more. “Thanks,” he said to the crow, “I must have drifted a bit.” The crow made a creaking sound deep in his throat, and James smiled. “I’m fine. I guess I was just more tired - and wound tight - than I thought.” He scratched gently at the top of his beak, and the crow’s eyes slipped shut as he hummed happily. “How about I join you, hmm?”

James moved quietly about his quarters as the crow watched him through slitted eyes. He drew the curtains, blocking the still-chilly night air and the brilliant waxing moon. The precise astrological full moon would likely come that night or the next morning. He pinched out the candle and banked the fire in the hearth, leaving the room barely lit by its ruddy glow. He pulled an extra comforter from a chest, and nudged the nest over a little so he could lay beside it. The crow fussed and grumbled, and James chuckled. “Hush dear. You’ve already got the best blankets in the place. The worst will be over soon.”

He drifted off like that, his fingers resting on warm feathers and quiet grumbling soothing his worries.

\----

At some point in the chilly pre-dawn hours, he woke to a hiss of pain. The crow struggled and thrashed in the darkness, then collapsed onto the pillow beside him with a groan. James ran a hand over his back, carefully, and felt blood among the feathers. “ _ Leave it, _ ” the crow croaked, “ _ ‘m tired. _ ” James pulled the mussed blankets over them both and settled beside the crow again. He carefully laid a hand on the crow’s neck, where feathers rarely lingered, and pet his thumb gently over the crow’s skin until he slept.

\----

When James next woke, it was to the tolling of the dawn bell. He laid still, watching a single beam of sunlight slip through the curtains to fall across the face of the man beside him. He studied the way it caressed the plane of his cheek, slipped around the dark hollow of his eye socket, and shone softly on the black feathers entwined with his greying black hair. The man stirred and shifted, prying his eyes open, and James smiled. The ray of sunlight just kissed the edge of one iris, and the light bounced about inside of it, making his lover’s garnet eye glow from within.

James pressed a kiss between those squinting eyes, and murmured, “Bright the day, my beautiful Qrow, and brighter for having you in it.”

Qrow huffed, and buried his face in James’ neck, below his chin. “When you say sappy shit like that, it makes your bitching about blood on your sheets less believable,” he muttered against the soft skin there.

“I object to the blood because it means you’re hurting. I’d keep you in my sheets forever, if either of us had the luxury.” 

Qrow grumbled, sounding so much like his bird-form that James had to smile. He tilted his head to look over what of Qrow’s back was visible above the covers. His pale skin was streaked with dried blood, and across his shoulders black feathers jutted through irritated red wounds. Some of the splits still glistened wetly.

“How’s it look?” Qrow asked. James could feel the tension in his jaw and shoulder, where he pressed into him. 

“Pretty awful. Not the worst it’s ever been. How does it feel?” James touched a feather, ever so lightly.

Qrow hissed. “Like someone played naughts and crosses on my back with broken glass. The usual.”

James held a breath, then let it out, slowly. He nudged Qrow’s head out from under his chin for long enough to press a kiss to his temple. “Remind me to punch Ozpin when next I see them,” he murmured against his skin.

Qrow snorted, but leaned into the kiss. “Sometimes I wish you could.”

\----

The reclusive wizard wasn’t a bad person, all told. They cared about the world around them, and they did more for it than even James’ equals among the peers of the realm thought. But then, to be fair, none of them ever had Ozpin’s favorite messenger in their beds or in their hearts.

And, to be fair, none of them had half of their body replaced with artefacts of the wizard’s power after a fight with a particularly vicious monster of Grimm.

But despite the good that Ozpin had done, and despite the good that Qrow’s bird form enabled him to do, James could only resent the price of the power the wizard had laid on his love. For eleven months of the year, Qrow lived, ate, and slept as a bird. He could shed his feathers and walk as a man for all of six hours a month, around the peak of the full moon - if he wasn’t on a mission in dangerous territory. 

The twelfth month was March. The end of winter.

The Crow Moon.

_ Molting. _

As the crow moon approached, his feathers, usually kept strong and ageless by the magic that changed him, would dull and weather. They would loosen in his skin, itching and twisting painfully. Eventually they would begin falling out, like the six flight feathers that James had collected shortly after Qrow had arrived at his window the evening before. But the cruelest part of it all was what happened when the crow moon turned full. 

\----

James had gotten up, stoked and rebuilt the fire. He’d found a large pot of hot water and a stack of fresh, soft cloths and bandages outside his chamber door, per the orders he’d given the day before. Now, he sat on the bed, with Qrow stretched out on the bed beside him, face down. James carefully cleaned blood off of skin and feathers, coaxing apart those feathers which had become stuck together. He emptied the now red-tinged bowl of water, and refilled it from the pot, which now sat on the hearth. He brought the bowl back to the bed, along with a box. The box held an array of surgical implements of the sort used on humans, and the sort used on birds, which would likely be of great interest to the unknowing observer. The box had a very good lock.

He smoothed his elf-steel hand down an unfeathered patch of Qrow’s side. The man sighed at the touch of cool metal on his irritated skin. “Ready?” James asked.

“Ready.”

\----

When the crow moon turned full, Qrow was forced into a state between his two ‘normal’ forms. He became human in most ways, but many of the feathers which he was in the process of molting remained, lodged in his skin like splinters. They thankfully remained the size of a normal crow’s feathers, but they seemed to multiply in number. The feathers ran over his shoulders, down his spine all the way to his buttocks, and down his arms. On particularly bad years - which this seemed to be - smaller clusters of feathers would be scattered elsewhere on his torso, and sometimes even his face. Feathers would also be entwined with his hair, but those were far less troublesome. James supposed that since those were lodged in true hair, and hair which fell out and renewed itself fairly regularly at that, the magic was better able to figure them out.

Over the course of the first seven to ten days after the full moon, the feathers would work their way out of Qrow’s skin. The largest ones tended to come out first, though James never knew if that was by design or simply because those were the ones Qrow picked at the worst. Either way, it was a small mercy, since the large tailfeathers at the base of Qrow’s spine meant that he couldn’t even sit without risking jamming an already painful feather - or worse, breaking it off under the skin.

In the second year that Qrow went to James, instead of Ozpin, during his molt, they had decided to try persuading the tailfeathers to let go early. It had mixed results, but with lots of hot water softening both skin and feather, lots of patience, and a few small incisions, James had managed to remove them all without causing Qrow too much more pain. With careful dressing and Qrow’s accelerated healing, he had been able to sit reasonably comfortably by the next morning. Since then, the procedure had become a regular part of the process. They’d experimented with removing more of the feathers, but had quickly found that risk of infection outweighed any gain in most cases. It seemed best to let the rest come out in their own time, though frequent washing and the occasional gentle tug seemed to help them along.

And so, when James had laid aside the last of the tailfeathers and washed and bandaged Qrow to his satisfaction, he put away the tools of that bloody work. He pulled a book off of the shelf and settled next to Qrow, his back against the headboard. Qrow shifted to tuck his face against his lover’s leg, and James buried his free hand in hair and feathers as he began to read aloud.

The molting would take seven to ten days; healing after that would be several days, if he could convince Qrow not to pick at his scabs. But after that, until the next full moon, Qrow was _his_.

Their time together always began in blood and pain, but James had learned, over the years, to ensure that it ended in perfect bliss.


End file.
